Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum is funding by US taxpayer dollars. For that
reason, among many others, all American taxpayers have an interest, and a
voice, in the museum. The USHMM
webpage provides the following numbers:

"Every
14 minutes, about 32 times a day, 363 days a year, in the shadow of the
Washington monument, a woman slowly intones her version of history: 'Christianity
emerged from Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew,' she begins. 'The early
Christian Church condemned Jews as agents of the devil, and blamed them for
killing Jesus. This accusation was not renounced until the 1960s with the
Second Vatican Council.'

She
continues, 'Christian crusaders slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews…. The
Protestant Reformation brought no end to the anti-Jewish tradition of
Christianity.'

After quoting
Martin Luther that Jewish homes should be burned, she gets to the present
century: 'Enter Hitler, Austrian-born and baptized a Catholic.' Her voice goes
deep as she imitates Hitler: 'In defending myself against the Jews I am acting
for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing
the job.'

Finally, she
warns, 'This is where prejudice can lead,' clearly meaning that Christian
prejudice against Jews led to their murder under Nazism.

Every 14
minutes, a clutch of sober visitors listen to this explanation of the
Holocaust, but this woman is not just another individual with a cause, wearing
a hand-stenciled placard, a common sight on the Washington mall.

She is the
voice-over for a film underwritten with federal money produced by the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, which has been prominently featured in the museum's permanent
exhibit for several years."

This US
taxpayer funded Christophobia and distortion of Holocaust history is not
happening in a vacuum. Christians are the people in the world today most likely
to be persecuted for their faith. See here. Mongering hatred against Christians, demonizing Christians and Christianity, are not victimless crimes.

Further,
citing Christianity as the Nazis' guiding philosophy is factually wrong. See here.

In brief:

Nazis did not
cite Christianity as their guiding philosophy.

Nazis did
cite other philosophies as guiding their actions, including nationalism, scientism,
atheism, Social Darwinism, and neo-Paganism.

Filip
Mazurczak is a correspondent for the National
Catholic Register and the assistant editor of the journal The European Conservative. He has
degrees in history and Hispanic studies from Creighton University,
international relations from the George Washington University and public
relations from the Jagiellonian University. He has lived and worked both in
Poland and the United States.

Filip
contributed his review, below, of his visit to the USHMM. I include Filip's
comments in full, though I don't agree with everything he says, or the way he
says it. I'm grateful that he brings the USHMM's Christophobic material to our
attention.

I wrote to
the USHMM and asked if they cared to respond. They did not respond to my
message.

USHMM Review

by Filip Mazurczak

For at least
the next six months, I will be living in Washington, DC. I decided to pay a
visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and share my thoughts.
Because the museum’s website boasts that 38 million people have visited it
since its dedication in 1993, few institutions in the world shape how the world
understands the destruction of European Jewry so much. People longing for an
accurate presentation of Polish history will be happy to learn that the museum
honors Żegota, details Nazi atrocities against non-Jewish Poles and sells books
about Polish rescuers of Jews. Nonetheless, visitors are misled into
incorrectly thinking that the Home Army was “nationalist” and “often
anti-Semitic.” Most troubling is the museum’s anti-Christian tone, which inaccurately
links medieval Christian anti-Judaism with the Final Solution.

The first
thing we see upon entering the museum is the bookstore. In it, we can find many
books on Polish Righteous Among the Nations (including a picture book on Irena
Sendler, the classic memoir The Cracow
Ghetto Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz and a book by Krystyna Chiger, a
Jewish child rescued by Polish sewer inspector Leopold Socha), books on Polish
martyrdom (such as Allen Paul’s book on Katyn and Miron Białoszewski’s account
of the Warsaw Uprising) and balanced books on Polish-Jewish affairs (including
Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist, the
best book on World War II and one of the best books I have read). On the other
hand, Jan T. Gross’s ugly polemic Golden
Harvests (one of the most biased books I’ve ever read) was on sale, and the
disgusting comic book Maus (which
presents Poles as anthropomorphic swine and concentration camp guards at
Auschwitz, which they were not) and the anti-Polish, historically inaccurate,
poorly written novels Mila 18 and Exodus by Leon Uris were showcased.

I had read
about the conflict related to the foundation of the Holocaust museum: should
non-Jewish victims be included as well? Ultimately, the decision to honor the
martyrdom of other groups was made. Thus I was pleased to see that the museum
made it clear that Roma were also locked in ghettoes along with Jews by the
Nazis, and that the Nazis also wanted their extermination. An exhibit detailing
Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles is included. With regards to the September
campaign, it is explicitly said that the Poles fought “bravely,” but received
no military assistance from France and England, whose declaration of war
against Nazi Germany was just a declaration.

It was
refreshing to see the museum commemorate the suffering of non-Jews like ethnic
Poles and acknowledge the West’s failings. These failings are also acknowledged
when the display explains that the Roosevelt White House refused to increase
immigration quotas to allow Jewish refugees to escape to the United States, and
that the American Department of War failed to bomb the crematoria of Auschwitz.
Although I knew about Roosevelt’s callous attitude towards the Holocaust, I
didn’t think that the museum would acknowledge these inconvenient facts. I also
was pleased that the museum mentioned other genocides (such as Darfur and the
abuses of Pol Pot, although it didn’t have the courage to mention the Armenian
Genocide). Some promote a ridiculous, chauvinistic doctrine that the Holocaust
was “unique.” Genocide is a tragedy, regardless of what group it affects. I’m
glad that the museum avoided this balderdash.

Another
pleasant surprise was that in the section on rescue, in addition to much
information about the bold Danes who endured a mild occupation and were allowed
to maintain their parliament and king and at one point didn’t even incur
punishments for aiding Jews, there was a display on Żegota. It features photos
of Żegota’s founders, and next to it is a copy of the flyer distributed across
Poland by the Nazis stating that Poles aiding Jews would be threatened with the
death penalty. Thus visitors to the Holocaust Memorial Museum learn that
despite such drastic punishments, there were Poles who aided Jews (however, the
display says that Żegota helped secure false papers and hiding spots for 4,000
Jews; the actual number was ten times that – did someone forget a zero?).

Shortly after
the tribute to Żegota, however, is the most anti-Polish part of the museum. It
mentions that “[i]n Poland, the nationalist Home Army was often hostile to
Jews.” Next to this display, there is information about Jews serving in the
resistance in Yugoslavia, Slovakia and France. In reality, between several
hundred and a couple thousand Jews fought in the Warsaw Uprising, and probably more
Jews fought in the ranks of the Home Army than any other anti-Nazi resistance
across Europe.

The Home Army
wasn’t “nationalist”; it was anti-Nazi and anti-communist and loyal to Poland’s
government-in-exile. Its members’ ideologies ranged on a wide scale, including
both nationalists and socialists. Recently, Joshua Zimmerman of Yeshiva
University published an excellent
book disproving the stereotype that the Home Army was anti-Semitic.
Zimmerman writes that the Polish underground’s attitude towards the Jews
varied. While in northeast Poland it issued a pronouncement to fight “Jewish
bandits,” in Hanaczów it saved the town’s entire Jewish population from Germans
and Ukrainian nationalists. The Home Army had a department devoted to aiding
Jews led by Henryk Woliński, and the Home Army’s new newspaper, the Information Bulletin, was edited by a
Righteous Gentile, scoutmaster Aleksander Kamiński, and featured frequent
condemnation of German atrocities, but also of Polish anti-Semites and
blackmailers of Jews.

While I
consider Timothy Snyder to be an overrated and unoriginal historian, he is
correct when he writes in his Black Earth
that the Home Army only occasionally killed Jews and that the far-right
National Armed Forces did so much more frequently. Snyder writes that the
accounts of anti-Semitic Home Army partisans in many Holocaust survivors’
accounts were often National Armed Forces partisans, and survivors confused the
two. I would encourage individuals of good will to write a petition to the
museum asking to change the historically incorrect statement insulting the Home
Army.

What I found
most troubling about the museum was its blatant anti-Christian tone. At the
beginning of the exhibit, there is a fifteen-minute documentary film titled
“Anti-Semitism” that is on loop. The film immediately starts with Christian
anti-Judaism, despite the fact that Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman
persecutions of Jews predated Christianity.

The film
details Christian prejudices against Jews in the Middle Ages, mentioning that
they were expelled from many European countries, accused of blood libel and
segregated from Christians in ghettoes. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is
presented. Only later does the film discuss secular strands of modern anti-Semitism:
the Dreyfus Affair, the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion and Nazi anti-Semitism. However, this is implicitly linked
to Christianity. After discussing the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the film
concludes with a statement that the Holocaust made Christian churches reexamine
their teachings on Judaism. Thus the viewer can logically infer that the Final
Solution was the product of Christianity.

Was there a
strong Christian tradition of anti-Judaism? One would have to be intellectually
dishonest to deny that. At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Catholic
Church decreed that Jews be separated from Christians and wear articles of
clothing to distinguish them from Christians. However, the film does not
present false information; it presents true information selectively.

For instance,
there is no mention that in addition to a strong Christian tradition of
anti-Judaism, there was also a Christian tradition of tolerance. It is true that
medieval Christians accused Jews of kidnapping Christian children and using
their blood to make matzos. What the documentary fails to mention, however, is
that multiple medieval popes had issued bulls defending Jews against such
charges. Pope St. Gregory the Great was one of the most philo-Semitic rulers of
all time, and Renaissance popes employed Jewish court doctors. While Pope
Alexander VI may have been corrupt and promiscuous, he invited Jews expelled by
the Spanish Inquisition to settle in Rome.

And the
documentary makes a big omission. It says that during the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, Jews were kicked out of England, Spain, Portugal and Germany,
“most of whom migrated eastward.” It doesn’t explain where “eastward” was. It
completely fails to mention the fact that at the time, Jewish civilization
flourished in Polin. While Christian
rulers like Isabella I and Edward I kicked Jews out of Spain and England,
Christian rulers like Boleslaus the Pious and Casimir the Great made Poland Paradisus Judaeorum.

The film
exclusively focuses on Christian anti-Semitism, making no mention of Islamic
anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon today, while
anti-Semitism flourishes in the Muslim world. Hitler himself said: “It’s been
our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Islam would have been much more
compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its
meekness and flabbiness?” Meanwhile, a dear friend of Hitler was then-mufti of
Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, who supported Hitler’s “solution” to the “Jewish
question.”

The film’s
implicit linking of Christian anti-Judaism to the Holocaust is incorrect. None
other than Zygmunt Bauman – a secular, Marxist Polish-Jewish sociologist and
philosopher – has argued that it was the Enlightenment and its obsession with
rationalism that gave birth to eugenics and pseudo-scientific racism,
culminating in the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger
(the late archbishop of Paris and a Jewish convert) arrived at similar
conclusions. The film makes no mention of the fact that Hitler hated
Christianity, and that atheistic anti-Semitism existed in Stalin’s USSR.

In sum, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a mixed bag. It honors Żegota and presents
the sufferings of non-Jewish Poles under Nazism, although it shows the Home
Army’s record on the Jews in a tendentious way. The worst is the documentary on
anti-Semitism. At the risk of sounding cynical, I must admit that I had to keep
myself from snickering as I watched its lopsided account of history.

13 comments:

This is an excellent piece of journalism (not to say that I agree with everything that Filip Mazarczuk writes).

The anti-Christian and anti-Polish aspects, of the Holocaust, as presented in American media and educational circles, are much deeper than the controversial film in the USHMM. I have seen countless examples of both, as described in my hundreds of reviews of Holocaust-related books and films.

It is good to see that there are some prominent Jews--albeit a few--who openly oppose the anti-Christian biases.

Finally, the negative aspects of past Jewish-Christian relations were not as one-sided as usually portrayed. For instance, during the Persian siege of Jerusalem in 614 A.D., Jews massacred tens of thousands of Christians. To read about this, please click on my name in this specific posting.

Hello Mr Peczkis,Jewish-Christian conflicts from the past are an obstacle in Polish-Jewish relations. I don't blame modern Jews for that, and I don't want to be blamed for Spanish Inquisition, crusades, "Armleder" massacres or Rindfleisch movement.

I have mixed feelings about this US Holocaust Memorial. On the one hand its good to hear that there is material about the suffering of the Polish people under Nazi German occupation.

Indeed....the Polish people were the ONLY people who the Nazi Germans punished with a DEATH PENALTY for helping or saving Jews. That's because initially the Poles were helping Jews right and left (even though Poles were slaves of the Nazi Germans) to the astonishment of the Nazi Germans...so the Germans tried to put an end to that by mandating a Death penalty to not only Poles who saved Jews...but ALSO to their Polish families. NEVERTHELESS....Poles continued to save Jews. Which barely gets any recognition in the mainstream media. Thousands of Poles saved Jews. Sadly Anti-Polish critics, sit in their comfortable living rooms today in SAFE America, WHO HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED A BRUTAL WAR AND OCCUPATION and say....yeah but those Poles SHOULD have saved MORE Jews! What arrogance these Anti-Polish critics have! Its like Poles were suppose to have Godlike powers or something like that. All these critics of Poles....if they were in the same positions as Poles in WWII...they would have NEVER LIFTED a finger to help a Jew or Pole being persecuted because they would be too afraid. What hypocrites these Anti-Polish critics are.

But I am glad this reading material that is sympathetic to Poland and tells the TRUTH about Poland...is in the Holocaust Museum. NO DOUBT that material would not be there.... if it was FOR NOT the Polish people who pushed to have that material in the Museum.

I am also glad that there is material at the Holocaust Museum on the secret Polish organizations like Zegota that saved Jews. So Good for the Polish people who got that material in there.

But I am disturbed by the Anti-Polish Material like "Maus" where Poles are portrayed as being "Pigs" in cartoons. Frankly....Polish Americans/Poles should HIGHLIGHT that this kind of propaganda about Polish people...SHOULD be the type of Nazi propaganda that the spirit of the Holocaust Museum should be AGAINST!

And I think in the future....we Polish Americans should bring to the Holocaust Museum....our experiences of how we have seen the Image of Polish people in the "American" media be put through a HOLOCAUST. There is no doubt that the image of Polish people has been put through a Holocaust by TV networks like NBC-TV.

The Nazi Anti-Polish hate jokes that NBC-TV, CBS-TV & ABC-TV have pushed since the 1960's....should be documented and put in the Holocaust Museum for the world to know...and especially for Americans to know. The Nazi Germans felt the Polish people had "subhuman intelligence" so they mocked Polish people with their Nazi subhuman intelligence hate jokes about Poles. They are in two of Hitler's speeches shortly after the invasion of Poland. Ironically and hypocritically...the "American" TV networks...who claimed to be "Anti-Nazi".....IMPORTED these Nazi Anti-Polish jokes into America after WWII (mostly 1960's) and MADE SURE to NEVER tell the American people the Nazi German origins of these Nazi Anti-Polish hate jokes.

The spirit of the Holocaust museum is that we human beings learn from the prejudices of the past....to NOT REPEAT them....whether it s in the drastic form of killing other people...or simply using mocking or ridiculing language to other groups of people to make them feel uncomfortable.

Many Polish Americans feel the "American" TV networks....especially the anti-Polish element at NBC-TV...have NOT LEARNED from the Holocaust and hatreds of WWII that came out of Nazi Germany....like the Nazi Stereotype of Polish people having "subhuman intelligence"

This is an excellent review of the USHMM by Filip Mazurczak(not that I agree with everything that he says)

For one thing, Christian philo-Semitism didn't "begin" in the 1960's, it began much earlier. For more on Christian philo-semitism in early and medieval Christian history see the excellent books Ephrem, A "Jewish" Sage by Elena Narinskaya(for early Christian history) and The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion and the Medieval Orgins of Tolerance by Edmund J. Mazza(for medieval Christianity). It should also be noted that most of the early church fathers weren't anti-Semitic even though some of them made anti-Semitic remarks(we have to understand these statements in their contexts). See this excllent translation of an ancient Christian commentary on Isaiah.https://www.amazon.com/Commentary-Isaiah-Ancient-Christian-Texts/dp/083082913X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1543779787&sr=1-1&keywords=9780830829132

Bieganski the Blog exists to further explore the themes of the book Bieganski the Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture. These themes include the false and damaging stereotype of Poles as brutes who are uniquely hateful and responsible for atrocity, and this stereotype's use in distorting WW II history and all accounts of atrocity. This blog welcomes comments from readers that address those themes. Off-topic and anti-Semitic posts are likely to be deleted. Your comment is more likely to be posted if: Your comment includes a real first and last name.Your comment uses Standard English spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Your comment uses I-statements rather than You-statements. Your comment states a position based on facts, rather than on ad hominem material. Your comment includes readily verifiable factual material, rather than speculation that veers wildly away from established facts. T'he full meaning of your comment is clear to the comment moderator the first time he or she glances over it. You comment is less likely to be posted if:You do not include a first and last name.Your comment is not in Standard English, with enough errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar to make the comment's meaning difficult to discern.Your comment includes ad hominem statements, or You-statements. You have previously posted, or attempted to post, in an inappropriate manner. You keep repeating the same things over and over and over again.